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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781623361631 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Harmony/Rodale |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2006 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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CHAPTER 1
My new home in Fugisawa is the essence of wealth--meaning it is a five-minute walk from the beach, fifteen minutes from the train station, and just under an hour's commute to Tokyo. It is a house, not an apartment, and has a thin layer of garden wrapped around it like a coat of varnish. The whole thing is protected from the prying eyes of neighbors and foreign thieves by a high cement wall. Inside lies the sole domain of my host mother, Yukiko.
There are two kinds of older women. There are those who let their hair go gray and their figures fill out around their hips and thighs. Their hands relax into their laps, and their faces gradually sag into laugh lines and molded smiles. They no longer bother with umbrellas and rarely vacuum under the bed.
Then there is Yukiko. Her hairdresser is one of her closest friends. She wears tight pants that emphasize her long, slender legs and exudes an air both regal and stylish, like a Victorian lady in stiffly ironed jeans. I am jealous because I have never looked that elegant, though I am half her age. I am afraid of her because I cannot tell the difference between her smile and her grimace.
Yukiko met Genji when she was twenty-one. She'd worked briefly as a nurse's helper in a hospital and then spent two years at home, learning to cook and clean. When Genji proposed, she achieved her life's most important goal. Two children quickly followed. Now, at fifty-eight, she has a full-time maid, carefully dyed black hair, seamless skin, and a domain that includes everything from the mailbox to the back fence. In Japan, the man may command a company of several thousand employees, but the woman rules the home--and everyone in it.
This seemingly insignificant fact would have enormous consequences for us all. Because when Genji raised his hand in a moment of spontaneous generosity, he invited me not only into his home but also his wife's--without asking her if she wanted me there.
Our differences are obvious from the very first day. Yukiko is very traditional. I am not. She is quite sure, for example, that all these newfangled cooking devices, like microwaves, break down food. I've done nothing to disabuse her of this notion because there is only one microwave in the house, and it is now conveniently located on my kitchen counter. Nobody in my host family can figure out how I managed to decipher all the buttons in a matter of minutes without being able to read a word of Japanese. I haven't told them that when my oven broke down in my last apartment, it took me almost a year to get it fixed. I use the microwave more often than the telephone.
Yukiko also doesn't believe in using the clothes dryer. Unfortunately, she doesn't believe in my using the dryer either, so I usually have to sneak upstairs with an armful of wet laundry when she's out shopping. Lately she's taken to turning on the burglar alarm in the laundry room whenever she leaves the house. I usually don't realize this until I open the door and hear a high-pitched squeal, at which point I toss my sodden clothes into the corner and rush downstairs to have a one-sided conversation with the master alarm system. I frantically punch buttons while a metallic female voice says several different versions of "Something-something-something, please!" I have only ninety seconds, which isn't nearly enough time to look up even one of the dozen Japanese pictographs under all those buttons, let alone figure out the proper disconnect sequence.
Eventually the alarm falls silent and I go sit by the phone with sweaty palms, practicing my most humble Japanese apologies and trying to remember this week's alarm code for when the security company calls. I'm quite sure that if I were in any other country, the security guys would look up the house number and say, "It's that crazy foreign woman doing her laundry again," then just ignore it. But this is Japan, and they always call within five minutes. If I hide the telephone under a pile of pillows, then an hour later someone in an official uniform shows up to check on it personally. They tell Yukiko, and she tells Genji, and he calls me upstairs to explain myself while he chuckles over his gin and tonic. Yukiko thinks this is hilarious. I do not.
But despite our differences, I really want us to be friends. So I discipline myself to do whatever it takes to fit into Yukiko's household and her priorities. If that means picking up the tiniest speck of lint on my bedroom floor, ironing my socks and sheets and underwear, separating my trash into seventeen different recycling categories, and becoming an expert in the culinary arts, then so be it.
To be honest, a part of me is actually looking forward to filling this long-neglected housekeeping hole in my life. For the past fifteen years my definition of a good meal has been one that takes less time to eat than it does to microwave, and less time to microwave than it does to download my e-mail.
Of course, I don't tell this to Yukiko. She doesn't even do e-mail, and her dinner preparations begin as soon as the breakfast dishes are in the drying rack. For the last half century she has dedicated herself to the ideal of Japanese womanhood, rising through the ranks with the discipline of a Tokyo salaryman eyeing the supreme spot of CEO. But then, she started at the young and impressionable age of eighteen. I, in contrast, am a squeaky old house, with ingrained habits that have to be torn down and a highly suspect foundation.
So she has taken it upon herself in the nicest possible way to turn me from an uncivilized barbarian into a proper Japanese woman.
And, for the first time in my adult life, I'm afraid.
Genji, my host father and judo instructor, stands well over six feet tall. He is two hundred £ds of solid muscle, with broad shoulders and a ramrod carriage. At sixty he is catlike in his agility, with the effortless elegance of a lifelong athlete. He has, in a rare moment of un-Japanese informality, suggested I call him Gas. I could no more bring myself to say this than I would name a Bengal tiger Muffin.
Despite his size, he is the most gracious man I've ever met. He has the kind of face that you would ask directions of in the train station and the generosity to immediately drop everything and take you where you want to go. His hair is starting to gray and his character beginning to show through his features--the embedded lines around his eyes and an intelligent, watchful expression. But the thing I like best about him is his laugh. He throws back his head and his entire body dissolves with mirth, instantly exploding those Japanese stereotypes of dour businessmen sitting stiffly around a conference table.
Until recently, Genji ran one of Tokyo's largest corporations--a position that requires the ability to spread vast amounts of oil on troubled waters and regroup fleeing armies with the wave of a hand. And he does it without ever having to say no. This is the hallmark of all truly elegant Japanese communication. Genji listens quietly to my latest ridiculous proposal. He nods his head as though impressed. He says, "Yes, but . . ." He allows the pause to hang delicately in the air. I immediately realize that my idea has been vetoed. No need to be blunt or confrontational. Subject closed. It's a form of Japanese ESP, and Genji has it down to an art.
And yet beneath that gentle disposition lies an almost religious faith in the twin Japanese virtues of obligation and obedience. He takes care of you, and you do as you are told. For all his gentle manners, Genji is not a man to cross.
Like most successful Tokyo businessmen, Genji attended private school, successfully navigated high-school examination hell, and merged seamlessly into the best private university in Tokyo. By the time he turned twenty-two he had acquired not only a degree in economics but an astonishing sixth-degree black belt in judo. Faced with a difficult choice, he didn't hesitate. He accepted a coveted job with one of Tokyo's oldest and most prestigious insurance companies. Judo fell by the wayside.
For the next thirty-five years he scaled the steep cliffs of corporate hierarchy, playing golf on weekends, drinking on weeknights, and catching an occasional glimpse of his patient wife and sleeping children. His single-minded devotion to duty was finally rewarded by a short trip to the summit--a two-year stint as president. Now, on the back side of the mountain, he has accepted a largely ceremonial role running several smaller subsidiaries while he waits to turn sixty. He has, in fact, only one more duty to perform before he can peacefully contemplate the first block of free time he has had since kindergarten. He still has to find a husband for his only daughter, Junko.
My host sister is extremely stylish, self-confident, even a little brash. Technically she's my "little" sister, being somewhat younger than I am. But since she can read and write and speak and navigate and do just about everything better than I can, we have a very lopsided relationship. That irks me, in small ways. There are a few places where I can hold my own against her, though they're not particularly relevant in suburban Japan. I can fly a hang glider, for example. I know how to sheer a vicuna. And my judo is far better than hers, since she's never set foot inside a judo club. The biggest difference between us isn't our present or our past, however, but our expectations for the future.
In the olden days--meaning up to and including present times--a daughter was expected to live with her parents until the day she could be handed over to some earnest and ambitious young man: her husband. Occasionally she took a job, not so much for the salary as a search engine to help her track down a gray suit with the proper samurai-salaryman attitude and tons of earning potential. Her own income was largely superfluous since her life was paid for, soup to nuts, by her devoted dad. But, just in case she got too comfortable with her single lifestyle, the Japanese built in a catch.
Not too long ago, when a young woman turned twenty-five she was only half-jokingly referred to as "Christmas cake"--a product that plummets in value if not sold by the twenty-fifth. Lately the sell-by date has been extended by a few years, but if a woman isn't within spitting distance of the altar when she turns thirty, her frantic father almost invariably beats a path to the door of the local nakoudo, or matchmaker.
Now, this is the twenty-first century, and Japan is the world's second-largest economy. One would naturally assume that matchmakers are about as sought after as typewriter ribbon. Nothing could be further from the truth. One-third of all marriages in Japan are still arranged. Unlike feudal times, the bride and groom are no longer introduced at the altar. Both parties are allowed to turn up their noses at the first candidate or two. But the matchmaker can still expect a seat of honor at the wedding and a fat envelope of cash from the newly unburdened dad.
Junko is twenty-seven, meaning her father is in a mental state somewhere between actively concerned and utterly panicked. Japan has a way of enforcing its moral code: Junko's company, off the books, will only employ her until she turns thirty. She was, after all, hired principally as potential marriage material for the up-and-climbing young men who are working fourteen-hour days and don't have time to look for a wife. Though "single" isn't written into her job description, the day she marries she is out of a job. If she should--heaven forbid--get pregnant without a husband, then she had better find a new line of work. Finally, to ensure that the company's future CEOs are exposed only to upstanding young women of good moral character, she is required to live at home, under the watchful supervision of her parents.
But in a country where woman's liberation and equal rights haven't made much headway, Pierre Cardin and Calvin Klein are blazing a wide trail. This is the first generation of Japanese who have not suffered through a war or its aftermath. Baffled parents who've lived their lives by the twin codes of discipline and sacrifice stare helplessly at children raised on Hello Kitty and cell phones. Junko's entire generation has been labeled the New Human Beings. Young women with $40,000 earnings and virtually no expenses have become a major force in the marketplace. The newspapers have dubbed them Parasite Princesses. They are a designer label's dream come true--many have even taken on nicknames after the brands they favor: Ms. Chanel or Sano Laurento. They have single-handedly driven Gucci sales up 600 percent while the Japanese economy struggles to climb out of its fourth recession.
Junko has few expenses, fewer responsibilities, and little use for a system that will give her a taste of freedom before abruptly zipping her up in a tiny apartment with nothing to do but clean and watch TV.
Still, her mother does her laundry, and her father pays the $200 taxi fare when she misses the last train home. It behooves her to at least pay lip service to the party line. Genji is planning to put out the word through the same university network that washed me up on his doorstep. Perhaps one of his fellow alums has a son in need of a wife.
And what will happen if Junko waits too long and suddenly finds herself facing the yawning abyss of spinsterhood?
Traditional Japanese inheritance laws leave everything to the eldest son. He gets not only the house but all the fields, ostensibly to keep them from being subdivided to the point of nonexistence. Second-born and below are expected to hit the road and fend for themselves. There's just one catch. The elder son--or rather his young wife--must in return provide social security for his parents, who fully expect to move in with them for the last ten or twenty years of their lives. Unmarried daughters who have, over time, morphed into bat-eared aunts are inherited along with the pots and pans. Hopefully, by then the elder son has a couple of impressionable daughters of his own who might benefit from the example of watching such errant behavior come to a bad end. In other words, young women can expect to be taken care of, cradle to grave.
Doesn't sound like such a bad deal.